17 Story Skyscraper Complete!

After nearly 2 months of near total monopoly of my 'hobby' time, I was able to complete the final assembly of my 17 Story Skyscraper! This building was inspired by some of the buildings that I found here using the DPM "Hilltown Hotel" kit. I used 3 kits to complete this building.

This is a fairly typical, mid-century American style skyscraper. I really wanted a larger, gothic looking structure to sit in the center of my city, and in general I'm fairly pleased with how its turned out.

Some of the features I added to it:

• A "Starburps" and a "Pret A Manger" on the ground floor. Both the Starburps and Pret a Manger signs are backlit with LED's on clear plastic on which white polyster adhesive paper is applied that was printed using a color laser printer (Kinkos). If you've read some of my earlier posts, I've been using the standard water-slide decals and color ink-jet printer, but was just not getting the color quality that I wanted. This white adhesive paper works great for these applications, providing almost commercial-level quality (although the laser toner will rub off easily).
• The "Starlight Lounge", which is on about the 12th Floor or so, and features color-changing LED's (in this case I again used the color laser copier from the neighborhood Kinkos and but print my art on transparent, overhead projector sheets and not the white adhesive paper used for the signs on the ground floor).

I spray-painted it with PolyScale "Concrete" and gave it a wash with Games Workshop Brown and Black ink, which really 'filled' in the cracks and makes the details in the castings pop out! Its not seamless, of course, as the kit only offers a couple of methods of doing cornices, so with some Games Workshop 'green stuff' was able to 'fake it' a bit in some areas so that the building appears to have the cornices and abutments where they should be.

The great thing, with this big project out of the way, I can spend some time on some smaller projects and start to enjoy the summer!